Drakes Supermarkets is the largest independent retail grocer in Australia, with more than 60 stores in South Australia and Queensland, and more than 6,000 staff.

Drakes worked with Nutanix and Adelaide-based IT service provider Nuago to replace its ageing IT environment with Nutanix HCI.

The new infrastructure supports Drakes' $125 million, state-of-the-art automated distribution centre, including advanced robotics technology, warehouse management, point of sales (POS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

"We've seen our warehousing and IT requirements more than double in the past few weeks, but we've maintained 100% availability across all of our systems," said Drakes IT manager Phillip Romano.

"We can now focus on taking care of our communities' shopping needs, getting those staff who can do to work remotely, and hire new staff directly from the increasing pool of unemployed Australians."

Drakes CEO Roger Drake says bringing distribution in-house and modernising the IT environment will lower costs to the extent that the company aims to take "$1,000 off the average family's annual grocery bill."

The company is now looking at expanding the HCI environment across all its stores and wholesale arms, and in the longer term take advantage of the Nutanix Xi IoT edge intelligence platform and video analytics to create new personalised experiences for customers.

Drakes may also move its 250 virtual machines onto the Nutanix AHV hypervisor.

"Drakes understands the value of its data and the insight it gives into the purchasing profile of its customers. So, it makes perfect sense to ensure that proprietary information is internally retained," said Nutanix's newly appointed managing director for ANZ Lee Thompson.

"By taking its distribution in-house, Drakes is taking control of its infrastructure and helping drive the future of retail."